John Oliver had previously called on Last Week Tonight viewers to submit comments to the FCC three years ago on the subject of net neutrality laws.
Photograph: Bravo/Getty Images

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) claimed on Monday that its online comments system was attacked hours after comedian John Oliver called on viewers of his HBO series Last Week Tonight to file comments to urge the agency to protect open internet rules.

John Oliver on net neutrality: 'Every internet group needs to come together'

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The FCC’s comment system became unreachable after Oliver’s show. The FCC said the issues were related to orchestrated denial-of-service attacks, not volume of calls.

Three years ago, Oliver’s call for tough “net neutrality” rules to prevent internet service providers from slowing traffic of rivals or favoring their own products or clients went viral and helped drive a record 4m comments to the FCC.

Now the new Republican FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, has pledged to take a “weed whacker” to those rules and Oliver has once more joined the fray. “Every internet group needs to come together like you successfully did three years ago … Gamers, YouTube celebrities, Instagram models, Tom from MySpace, if you’re still alive. We need all of you,” Oliver said.

“Beginning on Sunday night at midnight, our analysis reveals that the FCC was subject to multiple distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDos),” agency chief information officer David Bray said in a statement. “These were deliberate attempts by external actors to bombard the FCC’s comment system with a high amount of traffic to our commercial cloud host.”

The agency said the attacks “tied up the servers and prevented them from responding to people attempting to submit comments”.

Evan Greer, campaign director for internet activist group Fight for the Future, called for an inquiry.

“The FCC should immediately release their logs to an independent security analyst who can determine what really happened here. The public deserves to know and the FCC has a responsibility to maintain a functioning website to receive feedback from the public,” she said.